The GuruXP Blog

Hi, today I wont be bringing you any kind of tutorial or nothing by the style, but a tool that I discovered that I find very very interesting. It’s a tool as a service that will let us access complete predefined reports on the way of our Office365 subscription.

This tool is called COGMOTIVE .

Office365 native reports are just few and of course we can generate limited custom reports with PowerShell but we really would like more in detail reports like a forwarding enabled users without the need of PowerShell Cmdlets.

Well Cogmotive brings us many possibilities without being pendant of custom scripts being launched to get the detailed info and when needed.

When we first enter our Cogmotive account (free for subscriptions up to 25 users by the way) we’ll find a Dashboard with all the relevant data of our Office365 subscription.

And just on the left side all the reports we have available without any configuration (including the new ones that they constantly incorporate).

Its use is simple and shows the info without having any experience with PowerShell. There’s no need to install anything anywhere and the first time config is fast and simple. This process has two modes: automatic (for those who don’t want to complicate theirselves), and the manual mode (for curious like me).

Some of the reports that I’ve found interesting are:

Shared mailboxes size report

Mailbox size over time report

Users with Email forwarding enabled report

Users with mobile devices and their OS report

Security applied to mailboxes report

Assigned licenses inside the org report

Also we have the option to create, generate, export and also schedule custom reports to be e-mailed on a PDF or CSV format.

On the security side, the established session is via https but also incorporates the two factor authentication option to be used with the Microsoft Authenticator App.

Prices? See them by yourselves:

In conclusion, we can define a very large list of pros, but only two cons:

-the first one (just to be named as a defect), it’s only on English…

-the second one and a very important one, the account that needs to be created on the initial startup to be used as the reports service needs to be a member of the View-Only organization management (logic and necessary) and the HelpDesk Administrators role, this last role allows their members to reset non admin user passwords.

In my case i did the manual initial startup and when it came the part to add the user to the roles, i skipped the Helpdesk Administrator role and it works perfectly.

So my recommendation is that as is a simple, complete, reliable and free product for up to 25 users, it’s a must be in our Office365 subscription, at least to try out.

Until next post!

Hi, it just being announced the new Outlook Web App APP for iOS devices including iPhone and iPad where we can get the best of two worlds (let’s not cheat ourselves, iOS native mail app isn’t as good as it should be) letting us take the advantages of the aoutlook Web App rich client.

So why wait? Let’s test it out!:

IPhone: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/owa-for-iphone/id659503543

IPad: https://itunes.apple.com/us/app/owa-for-ipad/id659524331

Saludos!

Hi, today i´ll bring you a little tip when working with PowerShell to be made easy and friendly for those who aren’t comfortable with it or don’t want to remember arguments and other stuff when working with Office365. It’s no other thing than the «Out-GridView» modifier. This modifier is not something from out of this world but many people have already asked for something to make PowerShell working a bit easier and enables you to work a bit more GUI and less text based with Cmdlets without the need of remembering arguments and options for each CmdLet letting filter the info with just a few mouse clicks.

For Example, if we run the following CmdLet «Get-Mailbox | Out-GridView» we’ll obtain a list of mailboxes of our Org, including the assigned server for each user, identifier and assigned quota.

If we use it in combination with some other modifiers and/or arguments we can extend the info and play with it adding some filters on screen getting a clear view of what we want. For example on the following sreenshot we’ve run the CmdLet «Get-MsolUser | Get-Member | Out-GridView«:

Hope you find it useful.

It’s been time since I wanted to write a post like this to help people understand and choose the mailbox to be used with information sharing in organizations with Office365.

Since the point is to be able to implement the most adequate option for managing info to be shared, I’ve decided to name it «Shared info mailboxes on Office365».

So let’s start enumerating the options we have and describe them as well:

• Distribution Groups (DG): although is not a mailbox as well, it’s an option totally valid and recommended to keep in front. These are addresses enabled for sending and receiving departmental messages, but enabling all those messages to be distributed to their members as let them to respond as the department and no as individuals. It has no cost and you can practically create as much DGs as you want to.
• Shared Mailboxes: this type of mailbox allows us to send and receive departmental messages (i.e: administration@contoso.com) working like a team on a separate space than the personal mailbox, without the need of an additional license (as long as you don’t exceed the 5Gb storage limit, if you want more then you must assign a license allowing you to get up to 25Gb). Of course the user will still need an individual Exchange Online license assigned in order to access this mailbox.
•  Site Mailboxes: it’s like a shared mailbox, but the difference is the Platform where it resides, specifically in SharePoint Online so it can be viewed as a library inside the intranet portal keeping the attachments and Exchange Online for saving the body of the messages. This type of mailbox can be mail enabled in order to receive messages but doesn’t allows you to send messages as a departmental unit. It’s limit is 5Gb and needs no license to be assigned, but the user still needs an Exchange Online and a SharePoint Online license.
•  Modern Public Folders: that’s it, «Modern». Due that Microsoft removed the public folders functionality of their online Platform and now they’ve implemented it, they’ve decided to do it using the Exchange 2013 technology with some performance improvements. This the of mailbox is maybe the most comfortable of the options when it has to do with large orgs because it has no hard limits on the number of concurrent connections to it. As same as the rest of the options, it doesn’t need no license to be assigned but of course the users that want to access them still need an Exchange Online license to be assigned. Its limit is awesome compared to the other options as it gives 25Gb per public folder mailbox and you can get up to 50 public folder mailboxes, that’s about 1,25Tb of free storage.

In order to make things easy for you, I’ve decided to make a comparison table of what I think are the most important things to keep in mind when making a decision over every situation:

It’s not a big thing but sure helps someone. Although I will be writing a single post for ever type of mailbox named here so I can show up how to configure them and tell the positive and negative things about them.

Until next one!

It just launched the Network Analysis Tool for Office365 based on cloud (there’s no need to install any thing). On previous versions of Office365  like BPOS, there was a web-based tool that allowed you to measure the bandwidth of the Internet for Exchange Online, and then it came out another similar tool but for Lync Online Services. Besides the Exchange Online tool gotnremoved though it was very useful to determine if the client’s internet would be enough fornexchange online implementations or of you needed to have more.

Well, after several months, Microsoft has decided to re-launch this tool but improved, as it allows you not to only detect and resolve Office365 connectivity problems (including Lync), but also measure the internet bandwidth with exhaustive tests for Office365 implementations.

El the only requisites are Java and at least Internet Explorer 8.

Here are the urls:

North america:

• http://na.deployoffice365.com/
• http://na1-fasttrack.cloudapp.net/
• http://137.117.73.108/

Europe:

• http://emea.deployoffice365.com
• http://em1-fasttrack.cloudapp.net/
• http://137.117.182.107

Asia:

• http://apac.deployoffice365.com
• http://ap1-fasttrack.cloudapp.net
• http://137.116.128.60

Enjoy!

On this month of 2013, i´ve writen 2 posts so far:

• Exchange Online Public Folders
• Mail forwarding on Exchange Online with PowerShell

I Wish you find them useful, let me know if they are

One of Exchange Online functionalities as part of the Office365 suite is the ability to forward mails to another mailbox or smtp address quick and easy using the users Office365 portal. Besides, what happens when you have to do it as an admin on 500 users at a time? it results tedious right?.

well, we can do this quickly with the help of PowerShell with the following commands:

Forward mails to another mailbox:

Set-Mailbox user@domain.com -ForwardingAddress dest_mailbox@domain.com

Forward mailbox without saving a local copy:

Set-Mailbox user@domain.com -ForwardingAddress dest_mailbox@domain.com -DeliverToMailboxAndForward $false

Forwarding mails to another external mailbox:

Set-Mailbox user@domain.com -ForwardingSmtpAddress ext_mailbox@domain.com

Forwarding mails to another external mailbox without saving a local copy:

Set-Mailbox user@domain.com -ForwardingSmtpAddress ext_mailbox@domain.com -DeliverToMailboxAndForward $false

Apply the forwarding to users in mass:

Get-Mailbox | Where {$_.RecipientType -eq «UserMailbox»} | Set-Mailbox -ForwardingAddress dest_mailbox@domain.com

Apply the forwarding to users to be sent to external users in mass:

Get-Mailbox | Where {$_.RecipientType -eq «UserMailbox»} | Set-Mailbox -ForwardingSmtpAddress ext_mailbox@domain.com

Get forwarding Info of a user:

Get-Mailbox -Identity user@domain.com | fl DeliverToMailboxAndForward, ForwardingAddress, ForwardingSmtpAddress

Remove mail forwarding:

Set-Mailbox user@domain.com -ForwardingAddress $null

Remove mail forwarding sent to an external user:

Set-Mailbox user@domain.com -ForwardingSmtpAddress $null

Remove mail forwarding to users in mass:

Get-Mailbox | Where {$_.RecipientType -eq «UserMailbox»} | Set-Mailbox -ForwardingAddress $null

Remove mail forwarding sent to external users to users in mass:

Get-Mailbox | Where {$_.RecipientType -eq «UserMailbox»} | Set-Mailbox -ForwardingSmtpAddress $null

To disable the mail forwaring option to users:

Read this post

Hope it´s useful.

On this month of 2013, i´ve writen 4 posts so far:

• Data Loss Prevention with Office365 Exchange Online
• Attaching mailboxes on Outlook with Office365
• Disable E-Mail forwarding in OWA
• Public Folders on Office365 Exchange Online

I Wish you find them useful, let me know if they are

On this post i´ll explain something that´s been a problem for most of us at the time of migration from on-premises Exchange to Exchange Online… Public Folders.

When Microsoft published his first versión of Microsoft Exchange as SaaS (Software as a Service) named BPOS, it didn´t Support public folders otherwise it was an hybrid environment in this would have been stored on-premises and probably implement this feature on the next versión of the platform (Wave 14). Well the next version came and the feature wasn´t supported, even more, Online services Support told it was never going to be introduced because it was an obsolete feature also to be removed from on-premises future products. To workarround this area we have some alternatives like shared mailboxes or sharepoint libraries, but they´re not enough.

Finally Microsoft made a great effort afert listening the IT Community and who are in charge of such migrations, introducing two new features  onto Exchange Onlines new platform (Wave 15): Public Folders and Site Mailboxes.

On todays post i´ll be centered only on public folders, maybe it can result a Little bit long but it´s worth it.

First of all, the limitations:

• It´s not recommended to use this feature for archiving, for this purpose there´s the archiving feature available on Exchange Online Plan 2 and Office365 Plan E3 or even document libraries available on Sharepoint Online.
• It´s very important not to store more than 5000 elements on the main folders. This is more an Outlook limitation than Exchange Online because in theory storing beyond that number Outlook will begin to reduce its performance and so on we´ll get errors and pauses like «Outlook is not responding» (even if it does in a while).
• Public Folders are compatible with OWA, besides it will not be posible to create or delete them.
• The content of those folders are not indexed by Exchange Search, so we could search of a single folder but not in recursive mode.
• Retention policy tags are not compatible.
• It´s mandatory to use Outlook 2007 or newer (obviously).

Things to keep in mind:

• We can store documents, mails and messages.
• We can mail-enable public folders to receive automatically mails or even make them form part of a Distribution Group.
• When mail-enabling a public folder, we can configure limits and assign permissions to SendOnBehalfOf and SendAs.
• The changes will be synced every 15 minutes if there are users connected, if there aren´t any, it will do every 24 hours. Besides if the modification occurs on a root structure, the changes will be synced inmediately using an asynchronous sync.

Public Folders set-up on Exchange Online

Once we know the limitations and the things to keep in mind, lets proceed to configure this new feature:

1. First of all, Access the Office365 Portal with our Admin credentials and click on Admin – Exchange to enter the Exchange Online admin console.
   
2. Then click on Public Folders located on the left side.
   
3. Click on the Public Folders Mailboxes located on the upper side.
   
4. Hit the «+» button to create a new mailbox and indicate a name (i.e. IT) and hit on Save.
5. Once it´s been created the public folder mailbox, lets create a new public folder structure, to do so, click on the upper side where it says Public Folders.
   
6. Hit the «+» button to create a new folder, indicate a name and hit on save.
   
7. Then hit on the Pencil button to edit the recently created folder and configure features like retention policies (do not confuse with retention tags), limits and read mark status (user based or general)
   
8. Once done, assign permissions, simply click on the right side link where it says Folder Permissions and click on Manage.
   
9. Once inside we can give users access to this folder and wich permissions will it have (including the visible folder permission).
   
10. Repeat the process with all the folders we want and give a shape to the structure we want.

Now the checking part:

1. Enter our Outlook and Enable the folders view (it´s the only way to view public folders in Outlook).
   
2. Observe the public folders located on the bottom side. In my case, i´ve created two profiles, Josh Smith (User) and Alberto Pascual (Admin) in order to demonstrate the differences on the applied permissions. I´ve created a folder structure wich has three folders, one root folder (Cloud Support) and two child (E Plans y P Plans). Josh has view only permissions on the P Plans folders and the first image shows it, and on the second one shows Alberto structure:
   

Well, we´ve created a public folder mailbox, a public folder structure, assgined permissions and checked through two profiles on Outlook, but How do we do it on OWA?

1. Access our OWA
2. Right Click on the Favorites and click on Add Public Folder
   
3. Select a folder to show and click on Accept. you´ll see the differences of the permissions applied to both users, Josh (first image) and Alberto Pascual (second image).
   
4. We´ll have the public folders listed on the upper side on the favorites area.
   

Hope many of you find it useful.

Hi, a few days ago a client of mine made a petition where he needed to be able to prohibit some users the option to forward their e-mails from Outlook Web App in Exchange Online.

The case is that on an Exchange On-Premises is very easy, but on Exchange Online there´s no visible option to do so but with PowerShell and RBAC it´s posible and wanted to share it with you.

First of all, we need to get our PowerShell environment ready for the use with Office365.

Login to tour Office365 subscription with Admin credentials with the following commands::

$LIveCred = Get-Credential
$Session = New-PSSession -ConfigurationName Microsoft.Exchange -ConnectionUri https://ps.outlook.com/powershell/ -Credential $LIveCred -Authentication Basic -AllowRedirection
Import-PSSession $Session

Once we´re inside, we must enable Organization Customization in our subscription:

Enable-OrganizationCustomization

Create a new management role taking the base role as a base with the following command:

New-ManagementRole -Name Role_Name -Parent MyBaseOptions

Delete the forwarding attribute of the newly created role:

Set-ManagementRoleEntry Role_Name\Set-Mailbox -Parameters DeliverToMailboxAndForward -RemoveParameter

Create a new policy:

New-RoleAssignmentPolicy Policy_Name

Create a new management role assignment with the created role and policy:

New-ManagementRoleAssignment -Role Role_Name -Policy Policy_Name

Lastly, assign this configuration to the user we want to:

Get-Mailbox user@domain.com | Set-Mailbox -RoleAssignmentPolicy Policy_Name

If everything went ok, when the user logs in his Outlook Web App, it will be able to see on the right side the link to enable the e-mail forwarding option (image1), but different than a normal user (image2), the necessary fields to enable the forwarding will not appear (image3):

Image1:

Image2:

Image3:

Until next time.